A Conversation with Louise Amand on the Future of Business, Nature, and AI

This interview is part 𝐅𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐲, a series of weekly interviews with fresh takes on biodiversity in business.

This week I’m speaking with Louise Amand from the Capitals Coalition. As a global network of over 400 organizations, the Coalition has a unique view point on the entire ecosystem. They just launched a bold new strategy, signaling a major shift in where they believe the real power for change lies. I sat down with Louise to understand why they're going all-in on accounting, and what this tells us about the future of business and nature.

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Louise, from your position at the center of this huge network, what signals are you picking up?

The fundamental question companies are asking is, "How do we stay competitive in this new reality?" This wave of regulation is creating a powerful incentive to finally reshape accounting as we know it, integrating nature and society into the core of financial decision-making. We’re seeing a clear split: the laggards are resisting, but the frontrunners see this as a strategic opportunity and are actively embracing it. They understand that managing their impacts and dependencies on nature is no longer a 'nice-to-have' but a core component of business resilience and value creation.

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So, is the Coalition's new 10-year strategy a direct response to those signals?

That’s exactly right. Our mission has always been to embed the value of all capitals (natural, social, human, and produced) into decision-making. We've realized that the most powerful lever to achieve this is to go straight to the heart of the economic system: accounting. Accounting defines what businessesss value, and what we value is what we manage. It tells the story of a business.

If we can provide the tools to prove that investing in nature's wealth and people's well-being is as crucial as conventional financial success, we can reshape the entire system. This is our 'follow the honey' moment!

Accounting defines what businesses value, and what we value is what we manage.

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This sounds like you're opening up a significant new avenue, moving from engaging practitioners on the ground to influencing the rule-makers at the top. Who are these new 'power holders' you're targeting?

It's a deliberate shift to complement the bottom-up work we’ve always done. Our new audience is much more focused on the global and national power holders and regulators who set the agenda, organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), development banks, the UN, and standard-setters like the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). By embedding capitals thinking into the financial mechanisms these bodies oversee, we create a ripple effect that voluntary action alone could never achieve.

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What does this mean for your members?

Our community becomes more critical than ever, but their role evolves. We see them as multipliers. Our capacity-building strategy is designed to empower and decentralize action. Practically, this means we're redesigning our content into modular, bite-sized formats that our partners can adapt for their own contexts. We want them to take ownership. While we'll continue our work on Natural Capital, we see a huge need to advance Social and Human capital, and above all their integration and trade-offs. It's the integration of all capitals that is key to update our operating system. The goal is for our partners (consultancies, academics, industry groups) to become the delivery engine, using this knowledge to upskill their own networks and drive change from within.

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How can organizations build the internal capacity necessary to drive meaningful action, moving beyond compliance?

We see something over and over again: companies use excellent screening tools like ENCORE, the WWF Risk Filter, or IBAT, get an initial analysis, and then get stuck asking, "Now what? How much can I rely on this information?" Better governance, modeling, and visualization are the keys to moving them from analysis to action. Geographically located data, and maps that show exactly where impacts and dependencies are occurring, is a huge part of this. Interpretating such data to a specific context is hard, we are only just learning how to do that. 

After initial analysis, companies get stuck asking, "Now what? How much can I rely on this information?"

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Is AI an accelerator or a complication for your mission?

It’s both. AI is undoubtedly the future, but right now, it’s not consistently reliable, and that's a critical hurdle. The sentiment in our community is a mix of excitement and fear. Robust data is the bedrock of credible decision-making; it’s what allows a company to stand behind its numbers. But there’s a fear of losing control and a distrust in the 'black box' nature of some AI. If you can solve for transparency and trust, you unlock its immense potential.

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How could we build that confidence? And how are companies fixing that today?

This is the crucial question, and it's one we're actively working to solve. This is precisely why we developed the Integrated Decision-Making Framework. It is a practical approach for an integrated capitals assessment but with a clear governance structure. It’s a direct response to this challenge, and designed to give organizations a clear process for producing reliable and consistend information on their impacts and dependencies. It gives confidence to decision-makers to act.

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Our processes give decision-makers the confidence to act.

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Finally, for those of us trying to 'follow the honey' and anticipate the next big shift, what’s the one signal you believe people should be watching most closely in the coming year?

Watch the standard-setters. Pay close attention to the language and requirements coming out of bodies like the ISSB and EFRAG. When their standards begin to explicitly require the mandatory disclosure of financial dependencies on nature, that will be the definitive signal that the system has changed its definition of risk and value.